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Many of the land developers gentrifying portions of central Miami are already fairly annoying. For example, Bob Zangrillo, one of the major investors in the controversial Magic City Innovation District in Little Haiti, is a Burning Man attendee who was indicted earlier this year for allegedly paying bribes to get his daughter into the University of Southern California.
But no family of developers is quite as nauseating as the Kushners: father and felon Charles Kushner, son (and spouse of supermodel Karlie Kloss) Joshua Kushner, and Donald Trump's son-in-law and errand boy Jared Kushner. The family is apparently making some new real-estate moves in Miami. The real-estate blog the Next Miami reported yesterday the Kushner Company has filed paperwork to build a 1,100-unit apartment tower next to Braman Motors at 2000 Biscayne Blvd.
Per City of Miami documents, the tower is supposed to be 408 feet tall and cost roughly $550 million to build. The tower technically wasn't even the Kushners' idea — in 2017, the property's former owner, Verzasca Development, submitted nearly identical plans for a tower on that site, later approved by the city.
Jared Kushner previously ran the Kushner Company before he left to work in his father-in-law's White House. (Charles Kushner started the company but relinquished control after he was convicted in 2005 of illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering.)
The company is perhaps most famous for previously owning 666 Fifth Ave., a skyscraper in Manhattan and a financially plagued property Jared Kushner bought for $1.8 billion in 2007 in a deal that has been described as "reckless," a "loser" of a purchase, and "a drag on his family's real-estate company." According to the New York Times, Kushner bought the property despite the fact its worth was less than the debt owed on the property. As of 2018, the building was about 30 percent vacant and, through rent payments, generated only about half of its annual mortgage costs.
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